My 1000th Post!

Yup, this is it. My thousandth post on this blog. I am that much of a nerd. And I managed to do in about 34 months; which is even scarier when you consider that I hardly blogged this last summer because of behind the scenes blog technical issues! In honor of that, I’ve decided to blog about my blog – the most pointless of all blog endeavors!

My first post happened back on December 19th, 2007. Technically I had been blogging for a while at that point; first on Xanga, then on Myspace. Meanwhile, I’ve had personal websites since I was in college. I made the switch to a free wordpress blog so I could combine the two! Then I made the switch in September, 2009, to a self-hosted wordpress blog to make things a little easier for the behind the scenes mechanics of the blog. From the reader’s perspective, not much changed since I kept the basic appearance and all the content moved with it.

One of my favorite posts has been an article about missionary kids that I wrote a few years ago – it’s not a busy one, but I still hear from missionary kids, parents of missionary kids, and even those who minister to them on a regular basis that it was meaningful to them. That means a lot to me in ways that hard to verbalize.

Some highlights for me have been …

There have been close to 26,000 comments so far over the previous 999 posts. Those are real comments; on top of those there have been about 10,000 spam comments! Sheesh. Those guys don’t give up. One of the interesting things I’ve noticed in the last year is a new trend to click on the link to my blog post from my Facebook feed and then return to Facebook to comment on it; I’m still trying to figure that trend out.

This post by far had the most conversation with 5,783 comments. You guys are talkative!

All told there have been over 600,000 hits to my blog; with the first month of it being online the lowest (dozens of hits) and the biggest month being just over 52,000 hits. The busiest single day had 3,994 hits. The traffic tends to rise and fall with the casting patterns of Biggest Loser.

The busiest posts are the ones related to Biggest Loser or Youth Ministry. My posts that get the least traffic? Anything about video games. When I write about them I’m lucky if five people read it. But since no one wants to listen in the real world either, I have to get it out of my system somewhere!

And in all this time, traffic and conversation, I’ve only banned two people from the blog. A hater that was being nasty to all the Biggest Loser hopefuls, and someone making up wild (and hurtful) stories about my family!